[Elizabeth Bowen's Collected Stories are] a treasure house of pleasure and mystery; even in the less successful of the seventy-nine, those that retain a "magazine" touch, some of the ghost stories and the Saki-like tales of Wise Children, there is always some fineness of phrasing, some shrewd observation (how could she have known so much?), and the strong evocation of place that is her signature. She wondered, in a manuscript she was working on at the time of her death in 1973, why people showed so little curiosity about the places:

Thesis-writers, interviewers or individuals I encounter at parties all but stick to the same track, which by-passes locality. On the subject of my symbology, if any, or psychology (whether my own or my characters'), I have occasionally been run ragged; but as to the where of my stories, its importance in them and for me, and the reasons...